Elite India and the foreign correspondent

Live Mint , Friday, June 05, 2015
Correspondent : Dipankar De Sarkar
When American academic Katherine Mayo wrote a rant about India and Indians in her book Mother India back in the 1920s, Mahatma Gandhidescribed it as “the report of a drain inspector sent out with the one purpose of opening and examining the drains of the country to be reported upon or to give a graphic description of the stench exuded by the opened drains”.

When the writer V.S. Naipaul similarly described India dimly in his celebrated An Area of Darkness in the 1960s, it was immediately rubbished in Delhi’s political circles as one more venal view of India. Rather than answer its critic, the government banned it.

Those were years dominated by India’s oldest political party, the Congress. The country was in the midst of “nation building” and any criticism was sharply put down as an “anti-Indian” distraction, sometimes a Western conspiracy.

The reputed academic journal The Economic and Political Weekly, then known as The Economic Weekly, ran a review of the book, that ended with this rousing paragraph:

“Perhaps, some day, Naipaul will return to the land of his ancestors to discover it again not in anger and contempt, but in joy and pride. India cannot be discovered by arrogant men or the sahibs. You can do almost anything with the past except quarrel with it. The contemporary Indian is heir to his past and he can do nothing to change it. All that he can do is to seek to change the future. This, many Indians are trying hard to do, imperfectly perhaps, but nevertheless sincerely. They would be delighted to enlist Naipaul to their ranks. Their task is by no means easy. Even while struggling to build a new India, they have to reckon with the burden of their Indian upbringing. Naipaul can help them, but not from London.” It was signed, An Indian.

These rows—and there are many more examples—encapsulated a deep chasm in perception, between the Indians’ own view of themselves, and how erudite foreigners often saw them. When we say “Indian” here, we mean the elite.

For a democracy, it used to be said by fair-minded and Westernized Indians who were not in the Soviet camp, India has always been curiously edgy about criticism—a bit like China and the now-disappeared Soviet Union. It could lecture to all, but would not be lectured.

Something similar is happening now. Observations by foreigners—mainly foreign correspondents based in India, but also US President Barack Obama (who has spoken about the need to respect all faiths)—are leaving a lot of people hot under the collar.

The major difference this time around is that some influential sections of the Indian press seem to be nodding in agreement with not all, but some of the criticism.

Much of the recent criticism has been on environmental matters—specifically the lack of regulation, enforcement and individual responsibility that leaves India’s air and water extremely polluted and causes neighbourhood squalor.

It’s a fact of life no one denies in India. Yet, when New York Times’ South Asia correspondent Gardiner Harris wrote candidly and movingly in his valedictory piece about his three years in India, many Indians suddenly jumped to the defence of Mother India.

People who routinely shred bureaucrats and politicians in their dust-free air-conditioned South Delhi homes laid into Harris, saying the man couldn’t take the hardship of India. Men and women who escape India’s torrid summer to vacation in London and Paris suddenly began speaking up for the poor. The poor suffer, why couldn’t you, Mr Harris?

Yet, the mass-circulation Times of India saw it fit to reproduce the NYTpiece on its front page with the original title, ‘Did I jeopardize my kids’ health by moving to Delhi?’ The Indian paper, which has been running a “Let Delhi Breathe” campaign, sought to contextualize the first-person account with the following words: “Many will feel Harris’s account is exaggerated, but if this is how expats feel about the city’s air, there is a clear risk of Delhi being regarded as a blackhole in Western capitals. That, in turn, could threaten India’s quest for economic growth and global stature.”

Harris’s piece is best read in full online. But his conclusion is relevant here: “There is a growing expatriate literature, mostly out of China, describing the horrors of air pollution, the dangers to children and the increasingly desperate measures taken for protection. These accounts mostly end with the writers deciding to remain despite the horrors.

“Not this one. We are moving back to Washington this week.”

While the NYT man was catching a flight back home across the pond, The Observer came out with a forward-looking piece drawing a link between rising temperatures in India, the deaths they cause and global warming. The British daily focused on the disproportionate impact that global warming has on India’s poor.

The Observer report, by science writer Catherine de Lange rather than a foreign correspondent, also highlighted the need for India—without specifically mentioning names—to look at some of the issues surrounding technological solutions aimed at helping people cope with the effects of soaring temperatures.

In India, the most effective counter against the summer heat are air conditioners.

These are expensive by Indian standards and although more ubiquitous today, they are still largely confined to the homes of the wealthy and upper middle classes. Mint reported last summer that India sold about 3.3 million air conditioners in fiscal 2014. In July 2014, there were 28 million air conditioners in the country but the penetration rate was only 3-3.5%. This number is expected to reach 40-45 million in the coming two to three years.

The Observer piece was titled ‘The heat and the death toll are rising in India. Is this a glimpse of Earth’s future?’

Both reports were thoughtful in their own way. Both asked probing questions of India (beginning with the headline), both added to voices that are already being heard in India. One was a “here and now” micro view focusing on the writer and his family. The other looked at the macro picture—the climate and environmental challenges that lie ahead for not only India, but all countries.

Should access to air conditioners be a human right? Should we start looking at moving our working hours to after sunset? What are we doing as individuals to clean up our neighbourhood? What is our stake in our city, town, neighbourhood? What is the government doing to minimize pollution in air and in water?

As things stand, every person in India breathes in dirty air. Their nationality or class counts for little.

Dipankar De Sarkar’s Twitter handle is @Ddesarkar1

 
SOURCE : http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/B30mGgpdRdTkm4BzhdnPNO/Elite-India-and-the-foreign-correspondent.html
 


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